Have you ever thought about how you could contribute to the language? No matter your skill level, it's possible, and I'll explain how. But before that, I need to give a bit of context.

The Language

PHP is an open source programming language that impacts the daily lives of millions of people, directly or indirectly. Because of that, many companies and families around the world depend on it.

It was built, and for almost 30 years since, has been maintained and improved by many people spread across our planet, and that's what we call the community.

PHP Foundation

In case you don't know yet, the PHP Foundation recently came about, an organization that financially supports some developers to develop/maintain PHP's core. That funding mostly comes from companies, individuals, and communities that depend on the language. Still, the language also depends on people who contribute without direct funding, doing so on their own free time.

However, that's not the only thing that 'makes the language,' PHP isn't made only by a handful of people or companies, it's made by the community around it, and that has always been a differentiator!

Ways to contribute

So, if you depend on the language and want to contribute, it's possible. You don't need to be a core developer to do it, here are a few ways below:

• Support the community closest to your location (if there is one)
• Take part in in-person and online events related to the language (national and regional)
• Get involved with communities (national and regional)
• Translate the official documentation into your own language on GitHub (that link is for the Portuguese/pt_BR translation, there are equivalent repositories for other languages)
• Contribute to the core (reporting bugs, suggesting and/or implementing improvements)
• Sponsor open source projects that you or your company depend on (frameworks, extensions, packages, etc.) (any amount)
• Sponsor core development through the PHP Foundation (any amount)
• Share your knowledge (write a blog, publish articles or videos on social media, give talks, etc.)
• Support people who carry the language forward, who spread the word and drive the ecosystem around PHP
• Bring new people into PHP development (evangelism)
• Among others.

The Brazilian (pt_BR) documentation is on GitHub with a good part of it already translated, but there's still a lot missing. Check out the chart here.

To contribute to the core, you don't always need advanced knowledge of the C language, knowing how to read code will already help you a lot. If you want to go deeper, you'll need it.

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These are just a few ways for you to give a little back for what you've gotten from PHP. Know of another one? Let us know in the comments!

PHP isn't dying, and personally, I don't see that happening. I see PHP more alive and better than ever!